


Break, Breaking, Broken

by Measured



Category: 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Community: hc_bingo, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Present Tense, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-12 15:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/492537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured/pseuds/Measured
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>HC_bingo: trapped between worlds / fic promptly: here it goes again.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Break, Breaking, Broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiu227](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiu227/gifts).



> HC_bingo: trapped between worlds / fic promptly: here it goes again.

She comes back to consciousness with Aoi's arms around her. The room is dark metal, nondescript, a world she does not know. For a breathless second, she thinks she is on The Gigantic again. A second to reorient herself, to feel the nausea rising and push it down again as she struggles for breath. 

Her last memory is of reaching up past the water rising, rising. Another failure. She gasps for breath, closes her eyes. Behind her lids she can see it happening over and over. The hull breaks, the water rushes in, and she sinks down. She claws for air, her lungs burning as the light grows fainter.

"You're all right," Aoi says. "Dammit, Akane, _you're safe._ "

He says it so desperately, as if he could make it happen by sheer will. But, she isn't. She wants to touch her hair to see if it's still wet. Instead she steadies her breath. Which is she, now? Zero, Akane, June. She's all three and more, the innocent, the villain and the captured princess all in one. They are interchangeably, slowly merging into a single being where damsel and princess are pushed aside until only Zero is left and the masks Zero dons.

She tastes blood in her mouth, but it isn't this timeline, but another. Her mind is hazy. The plan, the plan, it seems so close, and yet so far. She needs to focus, but it feels as if every piece of her is being pulled apart. 

"I'm so tired," she says. 

She's wrung out to nothing, taken constantly by dreams which aren't dreams at all as she fails and fails to grasp that one key which will lead her away from the flames.

"We're gonna save you," Aoi says. "The plan is already set in motion. You just have to hang on a little longer."

He isn't harsh, the rough boy of the streets who'd crack someone upside the head just for looking at him wrong. He's her brother, the one who would be her Santa Claus. There's still a hint of what he was, but there's no hint of her anymore, just a hollow mask she occasionally puts on to further the plan.

_Oh how I wish I could be that girl again. The one who believed._

He holds her tight, as if he could hold her to this place so she'll never disappear again. Her skin bruises under his grip, the pain anchors her here, if only temporarily. Aoi will never leave her, he'll never stop trying to push at the world for what she's become, he'll never abandon her, even if she sinks to nothing, even if she turns into a monster.

But he can't be the one to save her, not completely, and he'll never forgive himself for that.

She closes her eyes and the tethers to this world blend, bleed. 

In another dimension, she burns.

In another dimension, she rules over an underground, sends people to her death in an endless cycle, an Ouroboros endlessly devouring its tail.

In another dimension, she drowns.

In another dimension she watches as everyone she has ever loved dies.

In this dimension she feels the aftershocks breaking her until she wonders if anything will be left by the time Junpei finds her.


End file.
